


The Spaces Between Light

by AwayLaughing



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Darkness, Gen, Historical, Mirkwood, POV Alternating, POV Mirkwood, POV Non-Human, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:54:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26225251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwayLaughing/pseuds/AwayLaughing
Summary: A forest is always a forest, but darkness is not always Darkness.The life of Mirkwood though the ages, if not totality, and in its own words.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 11
Collections: Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang 2020





	The Spaces Between Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FactorialRabbits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FactorialRabbits/gifts).



> In the silent, sleeping years the Forest’s many millions of leaves, it’s many sleek young trunks, were not as they would be in the years to come. For many years from the time of their birth they were alone. Nothing passed under Its bows, no one tread across the ground over Its roots. Nothing chewed the black bark, nothing found shelter in new, yet still strong branches. All was silent, all was still save the wind.

It was, in retrospect, a very boring and terrible time over all. Forests, after all, are things of life. Even in times where darkness is turned to cruel purpose, this is true.

* * *

The first things to walk beneath the bows of the Forest were its closest living kin. Young, pale things not yet protected from the outside world. Ents, in some tongues, and a name good enough for this tale, and many others besides. In the time of Silence, they travelled far and wide. They gently encouraged the Forest to take specific forms, though never so much that one would argue the Forest was anything but wild. Some tended more to the bushes, some spent their days burying seeds that would not come to waking for many, many lives yet. All acted as the Forest itself, save for their singular purpose.

They rarely spoke, though they had the faculty. After all, nothing spoke under the dark gnarled canopy of the Forest’s trees: only the wind, and sometimes even she lost her voice, tangled in the dark spaces at the Forest’s heart. This was not by design, rather it was an accident of birth, so to speak. Trees do not grow in lines, unless someone puts their mind to making it so – and the Ents were not of such minds. Nor do trees much pay attention to where they fall, when they die. The Ents did sometimes get it into their minds to pile the detritus of the Forest’s many lives, but only rarely.

Even when the world was young, the Forest was on its way to being old. At the same time it was forever young, dying and being reborn over and over as the cycles of the world pressed on. Yet, even it shook when older feet still, not unlike the feet from which it was born, walked through it. Because as old as you are, there is almost certainly always going to be something older, somewhere.

* * *

They came in violence – a concept foreign to the Forest in these dark, quiet days. As a dark, screeching note ran through it. Chasing off the wind and tearing up trees by the root simply in passing by them; the ground groaned. A million lives shrieked, shaken for the first time in their existence. The ground rose up, voiceless rock screaming as it lurched up and up and up.

When the dust settled, the Ents, and Entwives, were scattered. The movement they brought to the forest stilled to almost nothing, a return to a time already ancient, even before the time of the Waking World. Still the Forest remained. Through its centre, a barren, spiking scar. A sense of loss in the air, for the Forest, once nearly as a vast as the land it sat on, was for the first time – but far from the last – cut off from itself. It was a very strange feeling for the Forest, and the memory of it bled into the song in its roots. It never forgot, that once it was vast and uninterrupted, the heart of life in a still, dark world.

But it never returned to it, either.

* * *

In some time after the creation of the mountains – not to be properly named in any tongue known by living minds today for countless years to come – came something new. The Forest, old if not yet ancient, had waited patiently for some time. It had not known it was waiting, or what for, but it had been all the same.

A Forest after all is not just strange trees and sleeping ferns and silent seeds. A Forest is life. It is death and rebirth. It is a seeming stillness, and a constant movement. It is a home.

And so, when the first bird, a silent, wide eyed thing, swooped under a bough to land on a branch, the Forest paid attention. Over time, more and more joined the watching bird – nervous four legged things that could hide under branches, large eyed creatures which settled on the edge of the Forest’s many singing streams.

Life was coming to the Forest. Warm life, with luminous eyes. Creeping silent life, singing life, flying life. The Wind was no longer alone in its song.

And very soon, it never would be again.

* * *

The arrival of animals hadn’t been a particularly notable moment. Rather, it was a series of moments, notable for their uniqueness. The arrival of elves – arguably animals, if you asked the Forest, but admittedly unique – certainly was.

They came each one quietly, but in combination, and in the pervasive silence of a world without them, they were loud. And in truth, it was not in the nature of elves to be truly silent forever. They spoke of hidden stars, obscured by the Forest’s proud branches, its silver leaves. The darkness unnerved them, and the Forest understood. A Shadow stalked them, as the owls did the nervous mice, and it is terribly hard to spot a shadow in the dark.

But, the mice had never prevailed upon the Forest for direct help, instead finding the help already built into its roots, it’s leaves, it’s dead. Elves, comparison or not, were not mice.

“Forest shield us,” one of the bright, burning young things said, voice humming with the same song that tangles in the Forest’s roots.

“Forest shield us,” others, none less bright than the other, echoed.

The Forest, with its million listening ears, heard every whisper. It learned that it hid things – stars, which were of very little interest to the Forest. And so the remaining Ents, most cut off by the jagged mountain scar, crept about, and gently coaxed some branches a bit lower, so the hardy young things could, when they found them, climb up and see that their little pricks of far off light were still there. And they did, gleeful and curious and thankful.

They also, within time, found the Ents.

* * *

“Hoíde, I am utterly certain – that tree is moving.”

Hoíde looked up from the small fire they were risking, and tried not to scowl at her brother. In the warm light she could see his darting eyes all the better, and not for the first time, she half wished she stayed home, simply to be free of the paranoia.

“Trees do not walk, Kwentro,” she told him. A constant refrain, since they’d entered the great forest,

“That one does,” Kwentro said, stubborn as ever, standing abruptly, starling something in the trees above them into flying off. “I’m telling Ingwê.”

“Oh don’t do that. Go climb a tree, look at the starts a bit, you’ll feel better,” Hoíde said, reaching up to tug him back down, but he easily danced out from her grasp.

“I am not scared,” he said, and started to trot off, towards one of the fires distantly visible through the tall trunks around them. Hoíde scowled, standing up and ignoring some of the people laughing softly around her. Kwentro looked back at her only briefly, and seeing she was set to give chase, gave her a wide grin. “Oh no you don’t!” She said, lunging to catch up with him as he dashed off. “It’s not safe Kweno,” she said, “the Rider could still be here!”

“The trees will protect us,” Kwentro said over his shoulder, dodging left – not towards the fires. Hoíde tried to ignore the way her stomach flipped to see him disappear around a tree and followed the trailing ends of his pale hair. She nearly tripped over a root her haste, only to be braced by something.

“Kwen-” she started, and then slammed her jaw shut. She stared with wide eyes at the hand which had caught her gentle around the middle. It was larger than her face, with long fingers, the same craggy texture of tree-facing. She couldn’t make herself look up any more than that for a long moment, not until Kwentro returned.

“ĺdê,” he said, and then, “woah,” in very quick succession. She finally tore her eyes away from the hand, and looked up – and up – at the thing that had caught her.

“Thank you,” she said, voice coming out a bit thin. In response it gently let her go, and she rocked back on her heels a little, containing the twin urges to flee - and try to climb it.

“You,” the tree said in long, drawn out sounds, “are welcome.”

“Woah,” Kwento said. “ _Talking_ walking tree!”

“I am not a tree, though they are my kin,” the not-tree said. Hoíde found her voice at that, natural curiosity managing to muscle its way past her astonishment.

“What are you, then?”

“I am me,” the not-tree said. “What are you?”

“I am me as well,” Hoíde said, “but we all of as are the Eldar.”

The not-tree repeated the word several times over, slowly, as if savouring it.

“I see,” it said finally. “You are hunted by a Shadow, little Stars. My cousins shake down to their roots, for fear he will slash at their limbs.”

Hoíde frowned, familiar anxiety surging back up from where it had briefly gone dormant. Next to her, Kwento shifted nervously, ducking under her arm gratefully when she raised it for him.

“We know,” she said softly.

“It is not safe, for you, little Star, outside the wells of your hungry light.”

“Our hungry – oh, the fire,” Kwneto said.

“Yes,” the not-tree agreed. Great eyes blinked softly. “Return to it now, little Stars. We will do what we can to ease your way.”

“You can do that?” Hoíde said.

“We can make...suggestions,” it said, “sometimes our cousins listen. They are interested in you. It has been a long, long time since new feet walked over our earth.”

“Thank you,” Hoíde said, not even having to nudge Kwento to make him repeat her. Quickly the two siblings returned to the fire – and once it was in sight, something must have loosened in both their breastbones, because her brother spoke.

“I told you the trees were moving,” he said.

Hoíde sniffed. “You were wrong,” she said, “it very clearly was not a tree, it even said so. Now come on, we should tell Ingwê.”

“I was going to do that already!”

“ _You_ were going to tell him lies.”

* * *

Those were only the first of the Children of Eru to pass into the Forest’s edges. They were not the last, not by far. One by one, they came and they passed like wind from one end to another. The Forest watched them all, a million minds collecting tales to store and share in memories that lived far beyond the souls which recorded them.

Not all of them, though. While most left the dark bows and returned to the light of the stars in time, scaling the great Scar and naming it, many stayed. They debated, for many cycles of the stars through the sky, but they did not leave. Instead, they retreated back into the embrace of the forest. Even if you could not see the stars everywhere, elves were clever. The found the gaps in the canopy, and looked up. They found the pools that reflected the sky just as Cuiviénen had once done. They rejoiced to find the old piles of the Forest’s many, ever replenishing bodies, stacked as if waiting for something.

They sang, and they taught the trees around them without trying.

* * *

“Hello grandmother,” a young elf said, creeping up a stooping apple tree who lived in a glade. Or, rather, and apple-tree to be. It was not the first of its kind to set down root here, encourage to life by the song of Yavanna still strong in the soil. The tree had been very young indeed when this particular elf was born, but not so young that the elfling hadn’t been able to climb her at an appropriately early age. Not as tall and foreboding as her deep forest kin, she was a favourite of little elves to explore their natural desire to climb all over everything.

“I’m sorry I haven’t come in a while, monsters came down from the mountains and I wasn’t to leave the settlement. I met a boy who can speak to birds though, his family came to live with us so it would be safer,” she said, after grandmother had greeted her in return.

Grandmother had marked the missing little elf, as well as her many kin, but not with any great concern and not with any insult. She had too marked the prowling monsters who had passed under the eaves of the forest. The Forest had done what it could to foul them, but while the elves enjoyed the warm darkness, it also made it easier for nasty things to hide. Grandmother could do nothing, in her little open space, surrounded by her kin, but she was very happy the little elfling and her family had not been hewn by cruel axes. A tragic fate for any living thing, a tree of any sort knew. She told the elf as much, and asked after the bird-boy, and what he’d learned from the elves’ feathered kin.

“I’m happy too, grandmother, that they did not chop you down either. The boy said the owls are worried about something. Are you scared of anything, grandmother?”

Grandmother was, yes, though not much, as trees were not generally overly concerned with their mortality. Fire was always a concern, even if the elves were very mindful not to let it eat at the forest as it wanted to; fire had a mind of its own.

“Yes, that would be very scary,” the elfling agreed when grandmother conveyed this one concern. “But I meant something specific? The boy said he thought the owls were waiting for something.”

Grandmother considered this for a long, long moment. Trees did not wait any more than they philosophized, but she was, in the way a tree can be, to find the elfling’s words did call some strange feeling forward. At first, she had no idea what it was, and when she tried to tell the little elf, she was no more informed.

“Hmm,” the elfling said, touching her face where she’d felt warmth – the same feeling grandmother was waiting for. It wasn’t painful, like fire, did not eat away at anything. The elfling sighed softly, patting grandmother’s trunk. “I don’t think that’s fear,” she said finally. “I don’t know what it is though.”

Grandmother thought this was quiet alright. Elves liked, very much, to know things of course, but she had never found it terribly important. The elfling laughed at this, draping herself across a particularly sturdy branch, one leg swinging.

“I don’t know how to not want to know things,” she said, “but I’ll try to be like you Grandmother. My father is always saying to listen to my elders.”

Grandmother could not smile, but she and her mothers had witnessed elves do so many times, and so some approximation had been passed down through their lives. She impressed this upon the elfling, who smiled back.

Grandmother was very thankful, for the little elfling and her visit, even if she did find herself plagued by something.

Had Grandmother thought to ask someone older, she might have learned a new word:

Anticipation.

* * *

For many long, uncounted years until now, the Forest and all things within It had existed in near perfect darkness. The far off stars, beloved by the elves or not, did very little to bring true light. The Forest enjoyed this, knowing nothing else, but, just as Grandmother and the Owl both felt a change coming. Was it new feet? New wings? The Forest was not blessed with any foresight, save for what the song of its bones sang, which was only of things which had already arrived. And so, it was, in its own way, just as surprised as the elves when the first day of it’s life came to pass.

It came from the east, a great fire too far off to ever eat anything, but brighter than little fires that had lived in the dark heart of the Forest. The elves, haunted by long memories, quelled in fear at the sight of it, disappearing into the deepest parts they could find, seeking shadow and stillness. Above them, the Forest could not move, and the sudden heat and light proved to be the biggest change it would ever experience.

Pale leaves shrivelled and fell, on the first day. Black-as-night bark curled and fell to litter the ground. The mice and the owls were nearly as scared as the elves, retreating into the hollows and knolls of the forest’s trees. But even as they retreated, other things came to the Forest.

Animals unnamed as of yet exploded into life, having slept in places so hidden the Forest itself had not marked them. The trunks of the trees bore new bark – browns and silvers of many shades. From under their fallen armour, tender green sprouts of long quiet seeds, which slowly exploded into a riot colour. At the ends of branches, new leaves were born, not silver, but green – light green in their youth darkening to all the shades the elves could ever hope to name over time. Grandmother and her kin, in their now face-warming glade, grew little white flowers which teemed with the promise of further life.

The Forest stopped paying attention to the new lives coming to join it. It did not dislike any of them – not the buzzing ones who ate at its dead, creating new fresh soil for its roots and it’s new, beautiful flowers, for its ferns and its fungi. Not it’s winged ones, its furry ones, its burrowing ones, it’s striding ones. They were just very many, now, and though the Forest was them all, it is not in the nature of beings that are many to be aware of all their parts. The Forest was content to simply accept them as Itself.

And then more came.

* * *

The next of the Children were wholly unlike the elves, in that they were even smaller to the Forest’s vast sensibilities, and also they were not at all interested in coming to live within it and join with it. They came from the scar – the Misty Mountains, not down its slopes, but from their secret, guarded hearts. They did not linger long, and they did not talk to the forest as the elves did, but even then, eventually the trees on the edges, who met them more than most, came to understand them in their own way.

Sadly, the second Children never learned to understand the trees.

* * *

The Last Children were the loudest, and the mostest. They came like the elves, from the east in large groups. Much like the elves, the first to pass under the Forest’s edges were nervous. In the many years of the sun, the Forest had returned to darkness, of a sort. There was light, of course, but it was not that exposed light of the age of the new sun, before the Forest learned. Instead, it filtered through its leaves and needles. For people used to wide grass plains – it was a curiosity.

And humans, it turned out, were not one bit less curious than the elves.

* * *

“Do you think this is edible?” a young human held a mushroom up to his friend, frowning.

“I don’t know,” his friend said, “it doesn’t look like any of the others we’ve tested so far.”

“I know, that’s why I asked.”

“Well,” the second human tapped his chin. “I imagine there’s only one way to know.”

* * *

Forests, remember, are places of life. But to live, things must die. The Forest welcomed them all, letting the various dead break down slowly into its soil, so that it’s roots could grow stronger, and yield more food for the living.

Even though the elves had been here many years longer, it did not take many decades for the forest to have welcomed far more humans into its cycle. This was not something the Forest marked really – many things a day joined with it after all. They did not live in the heart of the forest anyway, much preferring the edges. They talked though, just like the elves, and would walk very far to do so with anyone who interested them.

* * *

Two humans, eager to visit family at the far end of the forest, sat beneath the bows of the Great wood and tried not to regret their choices. The road around the forest was long, but it was far easier to follow than the road through it. Still, if you did not get lost, the Forest Road was quite a bit quicker – and even the Forest had noticed that humans, unlike elves, were always keen to make a process quicker.

As such, the Forest was treated to a pair of them deep, deep within it as twilight fell. The trees around them rustled in interest, trying to say hello, and getting no response. Birds watched, curious, but fled when no song came, and the risk of becoming dinner occurred to them.

The two humans did not notice, which was just as well, as they likely would have been unnerved. More unnerved.

"Did you see that?"

"You'll have to be specific."

"Something moved – something living."

"It's a forest, it is the something living."

Alma looked at her husband, and scowled at his flippant response. “Roald,” she said, “I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I, there’s probably a dozen things watching us,” Roald said, poking at their fire. Around them, the dark had pressed in faster than it did on the western hills. Next to them, their little hand cart did not seem the protection they had silently hoped it would be. It was unsettling, but Roald wasn’t one to worry his womenfolk, not even when strange times were upon them. Of course, if you listened to the grandmothers of the village, strange times were just about always upon them, or about to be, or just passed before you were born.

Alma scowled harder at him, turning back to look at the darkness. If she was being honest, she would have admitted it was not just the sense of being watched. It was the closeness of the air here, it was not being able to see the sky. It felt wrong – like a cage. She disliked it immensely.

It did not occur to this child of the sun, that darkness did not have to be a cage. The Forest was a cradle, for many things, and always had been. The Forest took no offence however, nor did the trees, far happier to let the elves in their branches, watching over the humans with some curiosity, some distrust, some protection, lull them to sleep.

* * *

Time marched ever on, unremarked by the Forest, save for the passing of the seasons, though it marked no cycles between them. It gained a name, and a king, and it did not take very much note of the latter when it happened, though it enjoyed the former. It did notice the light, in the time of the king though. Elves danced and laughed through the seasons, stringing their handmade stars between the trees. It was bright and gay and oh so terribly temporary.

Because one day, the King left, and a great many of the Greenwood’s long denizens went with him. A girl who had once spoken to a not-yet apple tree, and now tended her many descendants. A boy turned adult who spoke with birds and knew all their voices like they were his own. They went, a long marching line the likes of which the Forest had not witnessed for many lives.

They did not return.

* * *

Greenwood the Great cried the day the army returned. Around them, the trees stooped in the twilight, and birds settled along the branches, more quiet than they would be.

Or so it seemed to Thranduil, but it might have been the imagining of a very tired mind. Certainly his people cried. Thranduil did not, seated front and centre at the ragged column of survivors.

“It’s good to be home,” Tinmactel said, voice as heavy as Thranduil’s own heart, despite his words. Still it prompted Thranduil to look around, the lanterns still hung, though unlit, his people still stood, although diminished. The forest still hummed with vibrant, rich life around them.

“Yes,” he said, summoning every bit of conviction he had. “It is.”

There was relief here, with the sky glimpsed only through the branches of Greenwood’s ancient canopy. There was familiarity in the dark corners and hovels of this world within a world, in the whisper of the leaves, ready to share the thoughts of trees if you simply listened. The songs of the forest weren’t the ones he was born in, but they were the home they had chosen. In time, they could sooth.

He hoped.

* * *

The Forest was old. It had seen the arrival of everything under the sun – of beings vaster, than itself, of animals that taught no tongues, of hewers of trunks, and settlers of stone. Its secret paths and hidden parts were open for, in theory, anyone. The Forest kept no barriers to entry, and paid no true mind to the individuals in its midst. The Forest was all of them, the vague sentience of a hundred million minds.

But there are things in this world that demand attention. Events that shake the earth; voices that ring so loudly even the mountains try to hold onto the words they speak; beings who sing out of tune with the rest of the world, a bitter discordant note that pervades the great Song.

One such being came in autumn, when the Forest was turning, slowly embracing the demands of winter. It did not come in noise, and fire, or in hacking and blood. It came like oil spilled from a lantern, oozing and blackened, easy to miss in dark spaces unless you looked just right.

The Forest disliked it immediately, and on some level, knew it.

It had passed once before, a fuller Shadow then, not this disparate wisp. On the heels of the First Ones, snatching at the unlucky or the foolhardy. They had not met since then, but even with all the ages of Man between them. Bu the Forest knew. Knew it’s song, knew it’s intentions.

It reclaimed the forgotten stones the elves had built high and left alone, save for the occasional place to sleep at night for the wandering tree-dwellers. High it climbed, and settled, a low and glaring shade overseeing a kingdom not yet its. The darkness, that seeping, pulsing thing stared out; the Forest looked back.

It would not allow this shadow, this perversion to sneak into its heart. The Forest changed all the time, it was the nature of all things living. It did not usually change of its own volition, but it could do so. It could protect its many beating hearts. Nature had many ways of warning though who paid attention, and the Forest would use any way it needed.

* * *

The knock on his door was perfunctory, a single sharp rap before Elinyl and Caralisi strode in. That was enough to set Thranduil on edge – his captain of the guard and wife weren’t at odds, but they weren’t often together. What alarmed him more was what was in Caralisi’s hand, a bundle of withered, twisted branches.

“There is something in Amon Lanc, Thranduil,” she said, slamming the branches down on the desk in front of him. “It’s poisoning the forest all around it.”

Thranduil dragged his eyes away from the branches, rubbing a hand over his face, ignoring the twinges of pain in his cheek. “I know of Amon Lanc, however-”.

“No, Thranduil,” Elinyl said, cutting Thranduil off. An event so unprecedented between them, Thranduil was genuinely too taken aback to remind him of even the vaguest sort of propriety. “I don’t think you do. We saw signs of orcs.”

“Orcs?” he sat up straighter, catching their eyes and seeing only grave concern. Swearing, he stood, giving himself a little room to pace a few feet, anything to dislodge the anxiety suddenly dancing in his core.

“I’d say 50, maybe closer to 60,” Elinyl said. “You need to let me arrange a few people for reconnaissance.”

Caralisi nodded, “we can at the least see what they’re doing to the forest,” she added.

“They are doing nothing,” Thranduil said, finding his first train of thought again. “If you had let me speak, I could have told you. I’ve spoken to those concerned, several of the Silvains agree with me – whatever is happening to the forest is not any sort of poison.”

Caralisi – far more Silvain than him, glowered, hands drawing to her hips, glancing to Elinyl as if looking for his support. Elinyl sighed.

“I do not know, Thranduil,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a poison of the usual sorts. Amon Lanc feels filthy. Ruined. And the changed parts of the forest feels...”

He trailed off, serious grey eyes drifting off to the left, into a memory.

“It is dark,” Caralisi said. “It’s not Greenwood as she should be.”

Thranduil sighed, sitting back down and finally gesturing for the two of them to sit at one of the spare chairs he kept on hand for similar – if usually more premeditated – meetings.

“I am not arguing that, but I just don’t see how sending several of our very few able fighters into the unknown will help,” he said.

Caralisi leaned forward, dark brown hair spilling onto her lap over her shoulder. “Thranduil, we cannot live in fear of every single thing that lurks in the dark.”

“I do not fear the dark,” he corrected, “I fear the Shadow, and rushing heedlessly into its grasp, mistaking it for a simple curious crevice of the world.”

It was Elynil’s turn to sigh, and then he stood.

“If we are going to spend the evening talking in circles, I am arranging supper,” he said. “Don’t get into any arguments until I’m back and can watch.”

* * *

Greenwood was no more, even if the Forest was. Mirkwood, many whispered now, but the Forest did not mind. Travellers and those who lived in it heeded its warnings after all – and still, even in the darkness it had draped itself in to combat the sickly song of the Shadow, people found joy. An apple-tree, who struggled to bear fruit but had done so every appropriate day of her life for the past 40 cycles of the sun, watched in joy as a young, greenleaf toddled towards it.

“This,” his mother said, stroking the apple-tree’s bark, “is Grandmother.”

“She makes apples!” the sproutling said, eyes wide on a face that seemed very tiny indeed to Grandmother.

“She does,” his mother said, gently pulling free one such fruit, low hanging and ripe, to Grandmother’s pride. “She is a reminder.”

“Of what?” the sproutling asked, clambering up onto one of her branches. His mother steadied him with one hand, handing her him a portion of fruit, cut with a sharp thing from her boot.

“That not all darkness is evil,” the mother said. “If it was always light, she would be too scorched to make apples after all.”

The sproutling considered this, and then asked Grandmother, “do you sleep, when it’s dark?”

Grandmother did.

“I do too!” the sproutling said, “and when I wake up it is easier to do things!”

“Yes,” his mother said, laughing and lifting him off Grandmother’s bows. “Now, what do we say when someone gives us food, my little leaf?”

“Thank you Grandmother for the apple, it is very good,” the sproutling said. To his mother he asked, “must we go?”

“Yes, I’m afraid it’s time for little elflings to bathe.”

The sound of the sproutling arguing again this – claiming leaves bathed in the rain, which Grandmother agreed was true, and wondered how else one could bathe – fading out of Grandmother’s range quickly. But Grandmother was never alone, tiny things that did not speak were always with her, and deer often came into the glade to enjoy her heavy labour.

Above her, unlike in much of the Forest, was open sky. At night, one could look up and, when the moon had waned fully, see the sky nearly as it had been, long, long ago, when her many-mothers-before had spoken with the firsts of firsts. If you looked up on such an evening, you might find it easier to remember:

The dark is not your enemy. It is where rest lives, and is home to as many gentle dreams as it is nightmares. After all, even when it was still called Great, the Forest had never been anything but. Light gave it life as it was now, but light was not it’s provenience nor its true origin. Though now it was twisted, an unmistakable warning of the dangers that plagued it, its heart, housed in the dark damp mounds of moss, in the safe hovels of mice, and the deep hollows of ancient trees, was still that of a forest. Of _the_ Forest.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This one's a bit odd I admit - the concept was very strong but it ended up turning out a bit differently from expected. I hope you enjoy it - my Artist and my other readers alike!


End file.
